Chương 223: Chapter 214: Navigating The Big Empty

There exists on the 11 th Floor an offshoot of Ouroboros so large that the rise and fall of nations comes as quickly and easily as breathing. This creature has passively witnessed the passing of Coils with nary a blink, the whole of human civilization a mere mote of dust in its eye. One day, William Oh passed by with a date, and the snake gave a wink and a thumb's up. Jason Salazar, in an Akul Bar.

"Check this out!" Bee shouted, flagging them from a window cut into the enormous central crystal. Will flew up and landed on the windowsill, feeling like some kind of bug as he was simply too small to see what Bee was pointing at until he traversed the windowsill, a good ten paces across. Inside was the corpse of a giant that might be at home with the 5 th Floor kaiju. Bones glittering with crystal and trapped miasma, large enough to build a small town in, lay scattered across the floor of this… enormous bathroom?

Pretty sure that's a toilet. Will thought, glancing up at the raised swimming pool in the back of the room. Maybe. Will dropped down and landed on some of the bones. The femur was the size of a massive piece of lumber, and just as easily walked across. The bones were more interesting than anything else. What Will knew about monsters was that their bodies rapidly dissipated into miasma, and the more magical they were, the faster it happened.

Without some kind of preservation magic, even the skeleton rapidly decomposed into miasma-less ash. So why are these bones still glittering like a decomposing monster? It didn't seem like the creature had just died. If anything, it seemed like this had happened ages ago. Will knelt to study the bone. Some of it looked like traditional off-white bone, with it's porous nature… but it blended seamlessly with a strange form of quartz.

Buried inside that quartz, it seemed like the blue Miasma was flickering, struggling to escape.

"…Can you see the miasma?" Will asked Bee as she alighted beside him, wings seamlessly retracting into her back.

"Yeah, it's glowing flickers of blue," she said, knocking on the crystalized bones. It's like the decomposition into miasma got trapped inside the crystal halfway through. … What kind of crystal can trap miasma? And how did it wind up inside this creature's body? And how can I use it to make my own Abilities? Will thought to himself as he studied the opalescent bone. On impulse, Will moved a bit of Charge from his center to the tips of his fingers, kneeling down. CREEEEAAK.

The bone underneath him shuddered and bent closer to Will's hand, seemingly lusting for the Charge in his hand. Will poked the bone. BOOOM! With an eruption of heat, light, and bone splinters, the rib Will was standing on exploded, sending shrapnel across the room. … Ow. Will hit the ceiling towering above, trailing a bit of smoke as the explosion propelled him upwards. He managed to catch himself just before gravity regained its hold on him and dragged him back down towards the floor.

"…That was energetic." Will said, stifling a cough, flying back down to the floor. Bee gave a sharp inhale through her teeth as she scanned Will's body.

"What, am I wounded, or something?" Will asked, scanning himself. Sometimes it takes a moment for the body to register the pain. Usually, it starts as a vague itch. No, underneath the ragged, partially burned silk suit was perfectly immaculate skin. The shrapnel didn't even manage to draw blood.

"William Oh, what have you done to your clothes!?" Anna's voice echoed through the long-abandoned giant's stronghold. Ah.

"Don't worry, I thought this might happen. I've got some spares in my luggage. I'll go change into-""You are NOT changing into something else until we actually make it to the wedding!" Anna retorted from where she was making lunch on the crystal roadside under an overhang that concealed them from the sky beyond.

"BOYS!"

"Aye aye!" Brianna cried before stifling a chortle and making a silly face. Will couldn't actually see them, given that they were outside and he was inside, but he could hear the smile just fine. It was a relief.

"I mean, I don't really care about the clothes, but-" Bee shrugged.

"No, she's right, might as well destroy these ones all the way instead of putting other clothes at risk." Will mused, plucking at the frayed edges where the shrapnel had torn through.

"Anyway, let's find a pinkie bone or something. I want to bring some of this stuff home and Zodiac doesn't need to know about it." Will wouldn't be surprised if this was a unique resource of the 11 th Floor. Why pay for it when he found some himself? The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Best not rub it in Zodiac's face, though. Bee nodded and the two began scrabbling across the skeleton until they found the giant's hand.

Will was able to fit most of the giant's hand inside Phantom Hand, thanks to the way Dimensional Storage shrank down its contents to make room for more. The bigger bones were simply too large to fit. Will had been a little concerned about more explosions if he tried to store the bones, but it was fine. Whatever Charge that made his Dimensional Storage function was seemingly insulated from interacting with the outside world in any way save the storage and shrinking effects. Insulation. Hmm.

Will's mind stewed on the idea as he sat and ate. Even with all this 'wedding' and 'politics' nonsense going on, he still wanted to create his own Ability before the one-year mark, just to prove that he could. What if I found a way to modify my air-spike cantrip to be more… on fire? It would be interesting, but it wouldn't be anything more than a modified cantrip. Will's goal was to create a new Ability from scratch, one that required Charge to operate.

Anything other than that was relying on pre-existing Miasmatic Structures created by his Class. The way the bones reacted so energetically to Charge made it exactly the sort of thing he'd like to experiment with… If I were back in my Stronghold. Alas, the goals of Climbing the Tower and studying the inner workings of Miasmatic Structures were at odds with each other. Need a travel set of tools.

Will's mind then began to break down what size the individual pieces might need to be in order to fit inside Dimensional Storage, and how best to reassemble them quickly, even as he ate Anna's sandwiches and soup. We don't exactly have forever to find the Stronghold. Will mused. Zodiac's stronghold is over twelve miles away, otherwise I would've seen it when I first scanned our surroundings. What do I do then? Maybe… brute force?

Will took his Map and stripped everything away but fear, making that glow like the sun. He set the map in its edge in his mind and spun it like a coin, giving him a rapidly pulsing view in every direction. No fear anywhere within twelve miles, but that was something Will already knew. Phantom Eye 214->150 Charges remaining. Will made sixty-four eyes and placed them at points facing outward all around the island: thirty-two above the disk and thirty-two below.

It made his brain hurt, but the fact that all the points of view looked so similar to each other helped. Will continued to spin the map while the sixty-four Phantom Eyes shot off in every direction. Nothing… nothing… The eyes were just as fast as his Phantom hand, so they were able to cover miles and miles of distance in a matter of minutes, rapidly leaving the limits of Will's auto-updating map. Still nothing?

In Will's mind he assigned each phantom eye a wide cone, and each cone was travelling away from him in different directions. Past a certain distance, there certainly could be gaps in what they were seeing, or… or a huge body was blocking Will's vision. Each Phantom Eye was over about thirty miles away from each other Phantom Eye when Will paused all of them, took a deep breath and had them spin in place, scanning the surroundings from their current location.

Just as Will's brain felt like it was going to break from all the information being forced through his mind, his map gave a faint glitter of fear, nearly fifty miles away. Will paused the map, orienting it on that glimmer of fear. Will directed the Phantom Eye closest to it to look at it, but saw nothing. He directed the five Phantom eyes around that one to also direct their gaze towards the spot. There. The glimmer returned. Somebody was nervous about something over there.

It didn't match any fears Will had in his legend, but it was a person. Why can't the most direct-facing eye see it, though? Giant monster? That turned out to be the case. There was a constellation-snake the size of a city between Will and the spot of fear, lazily floating through the night sky, so slowly that Will hadn't even been able to tell it was there. Only Will's eye that had been thirty miles to the left had been able to see past it, and just barely.

Will shut the other eyes down and focused his attention on the one eye, moving it around the sky-snake and towards the spot of fear. The detail on his map filled in as the eye got closer. There was a cluster of no less than seven disc-islands of crystal bound together by bridges of light emerging from their central crystals, looking like nothing less than a constellation with the connections drawn between them. Starting to understand why they call him 'Zodiac' Will thought.

On that cluster of seven islands, there were hundreds of glimmers of the low-grade fear and anxiety that a normal human settlement had on a daily basis. Fear of burning the soup, fear of not wiping properly. That kind of stuff.

"…I think I found the Stronghold," Will said.

"Where?" Brianna asked. Will consulted his own position relative to this new heading, then pointed down and slightly to the right.

"…Oh."

"It's about eighty miles away," Will said.

"Depending on how fast you want us to go, I can have us there in anywhere from an hour to a few minutes." Of course they would have to take a detour around the enormous snake, but that wasn't too big of a problem. In Will's mind, it was likely that the monster had grown to such a size that its sense of scale had rendered it unable to perceive humans as anything more than motes of dust. And monsters don't attack motes of dust. Probably. Hopefully.

"I'd prefer an even slower speed, honestly. I'm wearing a dress." Brianna said, gesturing to herself. Will pictured what thousand-mile-an-hour winds would do to the Tangled girl's green dress. While Will liked the picture and believed she could pull off the 'shredded clothes' look, he also understood the reasons why she might not want to. It was an expensive dress.

"Plus, I'd like to spend some time sightseeing from afar before we get there," she said, waggling her spyglass. Will nodded.

"Fair enough." Once they cleaned up lunch, they packed everything back in their luggage, and Brianna's copies all returned to her. Will took her hand and Phantom Hand propelled the two of them away from the abandoned Stronghold and towards the left side of the massive invisible sky-monster. A couple hours of smooth flight and idle conversation later, and Will was able to point out the Stronghold, just becoming large enough in the distance that the individual light-bridges between the crystal discs could be seen.

"Wow," Brianna gasped, holding the spyglass up to her eye and inspecting the cluster of islands, bound together by bands of light stretched between their primary pillars.

"There's trams moving across the light!" Brianna said, shaking in excitement.

"Or…gondolas, maybe? I wanna ride one. They look so romantic."

"You don't think flying effortlessly through the night sky is romantic?" Will asked with a raised brow. Brianna rolled her eyes and bonked Will gently with her spyglass.

"Being romantic is about the mood. The aesthetic. If I can't see what's moving us, it's missing a certain majesty, a certain…je nai sais quoi. But a tram…floating across a bridge of light…" Brianna clicked her tongue and circled her fingers with a crude affectation of class that Will found adorable.

"And there's a certain element of thrill, hanging over empty space that quickens the heart and sharing that quickening heartbeat with someone else…mmm!"

"So in essence, majestic, slightly scary experiences that you share with someone else are romantic?" Will clarified.

"There's more to it, but…that's about right." Brianna nodded.

"Look that direction." Will said, pointing behind them and slightly to the right.

"What do you…" Brianna paled as she was able to piece together the monster's face, its eyes and lips the only things that weren't perfectly camouflaged to match the night sky. Her grip tightened around Will's torso, hard enough to squeeze the life out of a pre-Class civilian.

"Will, I want to be in the Stronghold now." She whispered.

"Okay." Will replied, increasing their speed until the wind began threatening to damage her clothes.

"Why isn't it getting any smaller? We're moving, right? We are moving, right!?" Brianna said, jostling him, her voice rising unintentionally.

"Is it following us!?"

"No…it's just really big." Will replied.